OneRNG is a reliable and Open verifiable USB-connected hardware entropy source & random number generator.

History

Jim Cheetham has always wanted to get a decent entropy source for
the computers that he has been responsible for, but didn't manage
to grab an EntropyKey while they were still available.

Instead, in late 2013 he decided to make his own - but not
without help! Questions were asked of cryptographers
Ian Grigg
and Peter Gutmann
to make sure the OneRNG goals were
reasonable and useful, and then he asked Paul Campbell for
ideas on the hardware front.

Almost over the weekend, Paul repurposed some of his own
existing Open Source hardware projects to make a prototype version.
OneRNG was alive!

Funding via Kickstarter

Once a set of working devices had been created using Paul's
new Pick & Place machine, we started to look at how to
manufacture a reasonable volume of machines in a less manually-intensive
way.

We settled on a Kickstarter fundraising, to collect the cash needed
to set up manufacturing in Shenzen, China. The beauty of OneRNG's
attitude to verifiabililty rather than trust meant that we could
embrace the flexibility of Chinese manufacturing, without having to
worry about supply-chain subversion.

The campaign
started in mid-December 2014, and completed with a very
good indication of the demand for OneRNG - we met our initial goal
within only 6 days, and by the end of the campaign we were funded
to 485%.

Our estimated delivery date was May 2015, and by the end of May 2015
we had shipped all the units. There was a small return rate to deal
with an unreliable component, and these were all fixed manually.

New Zealand Open Source Awards 2016

On the 25th of October 2016, Paul Campbell won the NZOSA award for
Open Source Software Project
with the OneRNG Project,
saying "after all, most good hardware projects are mostly software".

Version 3

We are currently planning version 3 of the unit, and gearing up
for another production run in Shenzen. Due to the care that we take
with the firmware image, Paul needs to be present to load and verify
the devices.

Team Members

The core team at OneRNG is based in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Jim Cheetham

Jim has been full-time in the security field since the mid-2000s, and in the unix/networking field since the mid-1980s.
He is motivated by products that are useful, and likes to understand
the theoretical limits of a technology.
OneRNG represents a way to improve the underlying security of
many operating systems and tools, and to avoid security mis-steps.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimcheetham

Paul Campbell

Paul has been in the hardware and chip design fields for many years,
producing on-board crypto devices for real-time use cases.
He also enthuiastically supports the Open Source Hardware and Hackerspace
movements, and has a deep distrust of governments who choose to spy
on their own citizens. OneRNG is one of the ways to push
back against the system, and to take responsibility for your own security.